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Terroir

An excellent article on the "Terroir" of chocolatebyBill Nesto click here.Bill Nesto has a "Masters in Wine" certificate.

A response to the article by Georg Bernardini of Coppeneur:

The article is interesting!

A lot of thinking is in my opinion correct. It is also correct that there is a lot of cheating in the chocolate business.

Cheating from farmers and bean-dealers selling origin beans which are not true.

A very well know route is as follows:

Bringing beans from Colombia to Venezuela than to Trinidad and selling these beans as Trinidad-Origin. Or directly from Venezuela to Trinidad.

In most cases you can find out if they are selling Columbian beans as Trinidad beans because the cadmium is much higher in Columbian beans compared to Trinidad beans.

Cheating sometimes occurs among chocolate makers who claim to sell single origin or single plantation chocolate but in reality the beans are a blend of a variety of origins.

Sometimes plantations do not even exist or there is mixing of origin chocolate with Ivory Coast chocolate or they use a "famous" plantation or single origin name but use other cocoa. I know a lot of examples and I hate this kind of cheating.

Coppeneur always tries to be correct.

Why did we stop producing our Java bars? On our first shipment we received very nice Java beans, but all Java beans which we received after the first delivery was sub-standard. We think the sub-standard shipments consisted of beans from Indonesia, but not specifically from Java. Perhaps they were from Sumatra. We'll discontinue producing this bar.

We are sure the other origins which we buy are all correct but we are not sure that the beans are all 100% genetically identical.

For example the Ocumare region of Venezuela . Most of beans we receive are Criollo but we are sure that 30-40% of the beans are Trinitario.

We think there are very few quantities of genetically pure beans in the market.

However, the Hacienda Iara beans which we purchase from Ecuador are true Nacional beans and we're sure the beans only come from this one plantation.

In the next few months a positive change in our single plantation and single origin bars will occur. We'll inform you about this as soon as possible.